If you’re wondering, that’s a nickname that my arch-nemesis Swan gave me. She really loves to make fun of me.
If you’ve been to Japan or been exposed to Japanese culture, then you’ve probably heard of Yakisoba. When it comes to Yakisoba, it always reminds me of summer, and all the festivals. Because at just about every single festival I’ve been to in Japan, they’re always serving yakisoba. It’s definitely a dish I love to eat, and gives me plenty of great memories. Yakisoba, in case you didn’t know, is a fried type of noodle, very similar to (and derived from) chinese chow mein. It’s very tasty, and you can have all kinds of additions to it, like pork, cabbage, and so on. Very similar to ramen, except without the soup.
But the yakisoba that I’d like to talk about is an instant Yakisoba called UFO Yakisoba. It’s an instant type of Yakisoba, so it’s similar to cup ramen or cup noodle where you just add water and go. But of course, the question here is simple, why all the water if there’s no soup? Basically the water is to soften up the yakisoba noodles. After 3 minutes or so (just like cup ramen), you remove the water using a very ingenius contraption on the package. You can “tear off” one side of the package to reveal a sub layer with holes in it, just big enough to allow water to pass through, but not the noodles. Incredible you say? Hell, it’s genius if you ask me. Back in the old days you had to strain the water out and well, it sucked. But now UFO noodles makes it easy for you.
But I talk not about how good UFO Yakisoba is, but instead how the aroma of the yakisoba sauce totally brings me back to the old days of youth. It brings me back to Japan and the memories of hanging out with my friends. To me, UFO Yakisoba isn’t just about convenience and good eats. It’s about memories and friendship and mainly, it’s just about Japan. It’s probably a bad thing that an instant Yakisoba makes me think of Japan, but it’s so very true. If you ever get the chance to pick up some UFO brand Yakisoba, try it out. All you need is some hot water and 3 minutes later, you’ll be eating tasty Yakisoba just like me.
Perhaps you’ve seen that Pizza Hut is now offering pasta. You can get 2 different kinds of “Tuscani” pasta, alfredo or marinara. We tried out the alfredo sauce pasta since red sauce seems to be notorious for causing serious heartburn in this household. You know what, it wasn’t bad at all. Actually it was pretty good. If I had a complaint, I’d only complain that it was perhaps a bit too salty for my tastes. But that’s just about it. Each pasta order is enough to feed 4, and yes, it really is a lot of food. It comes with 5 breadsticks, which in itself are pretty good, but nothing earth shattering.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed with it. I think they might have made a pretty decent move. Now if only they’d come up with baked spaghetti, it would be just a bit better! The commercial is after the bump.
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This release of Wordpress is set to squash out the bugs that have been annoying some people, and also is a security fix related to open registration that has not been made public yet. If you’re using 2.5, you’re urged to update. There are apparently over 70 other fixes in this update as well. Including fixing the flash media uploader for IE 7. Unfortunately for myself, it doesn’t fix the issue I’m having, which is most likely because of all the stupid stuff I’ve installed since I moved to wordpress in the recent past.
I tell you, upgrading and upgrading your installs of any software will eventually make it do things you’ve never thought would happen. I’m about this close to converting my personal blog back to ExpressionEngine. But no, I won’t do that. Yet.
Apparently, Food Network has announced the new Dinner: Impossible chef to be Chef Michael Symon. You may remember Chef Symon as the chef who won the Next Iron Chef challenge and currently also stands as on of the American Iron Chefs.
It looks like they’re also changing the format of the show and making it an hour long. I don’t know about any of you people out there, but that pleases me! I love the show Dinner: Impossible and love that it’s going to be an hour long. It’s really too bad that Robert Irvine is no longer the host, since he’s definitely one of my favourites, but I like Chef Symon as well.
Here’s hoping Chef Symon didn’t exaggerate on his resume either!
So yesterday, I spent some time making some Gyoza. If the word “gyoza” is greek to you, and you’re not sure what it is, I’ll explain. It’s also known as Mandu or Chinese dumplings, or it’s most common name of “pot stickers”. I make mine less vegetarian and quite meaty. I use ground pork and green onions. That’s about it for the filling. Then I put them in Gyoza wrappers or round wonton wrappers and seal them in. Mmmm good. Gyoza makes an excellent side for Ramen. I don’t think there is just anything better to go with Ramen except perhaps beer. Beer, Gyoza and Ramen, quite the combination.
Excuse me while I break into the Gyoza leftovers.
I’ve been throwing around the idea of having pop up comments on this blog. I’d just like to get a poll going on which you prefer. Pop-up comments or non-pop-up comments which basically go to a separate page to do comments. I’d love to hear any feedback on this because it’s been one of those things that have been bothering me.
While on one hand I really hate pop ups, there are reasons why pop-up comments could be a good thing. The biggest reason is pretty obvious for Expression Engine users, mainly because you don’t have to have a separate page for comments as a permalink. It gets kinda annoying when you have 2 pages that are essentially permalinks, and yet only one has comments on it. The popup comments would always be on every permalink page, which would essentially become one page now instead of two.
The disadvantage of course, is with a popup comment window, when people reply to a comment and they get the email notification, the comment page they are going to becomes the popup comment. This can get really annoying. But there are ways around this, to direct the person to the permalink page instead of the comment page.
So please, take a vote, let me know what you think!
For those of you who didn’t already know, ExpressioneEngine 1.6.3 and Forums 2.1.0 have been released. These are maintenance releases, and fixes a bunch of bugs. There are no new features. But it’s highly recommended by the EE team to go ahead and keep up to date to minimize the headaches you have when ExpressionEngine 2.0 comes out. Well, they might not have put it in exactly that wording.
ExpressionEngine 1.6.3 is codenamed El Llama. How can you not love a company with a sense of humour?
Ok, so I’ve downloaded, installed and tested Wordpress 2.5 RC1. I’m happy to announce that all my entries work just fine. The import process went great. It even asked me if I’d like to upload any images that were uploaded in my prior install. I didn’t see this in prior installs, so I’m guessing this is relatively new. Here’s a list of likes and dislikes (which I have already sent in to the 2.5 feedback email):
Things I don’t like :
1. too much wasted space at top. If there was only one line of stuff, that would work great. but there’s a lot of wasted space there. don’t like that. I would suggest that the name of the site show up next to “dashboard” or something similar to that and the visit site could go next to that. that would save so much more space.
2. on the write page. the categories are at the bottom. I’m likely to forget to choose a category and get pissed about it. I like in the 2.33 how you can move the items around. you can’t do that anymore. I don’t like that. I’d almost like to see the categories on the right under the post buttons.
3. Still no way to do sticky posts! This is really needed!
Things I like:
1. The menu options is just about right. i like that. “unimportant” items (settings/plugins) or items I don’t use everyday are small and set aside.
2. I like the “most used” clicking option on categories. neat.
3. i like the way tags are done. it looks like it still uses a bit of space though. but that’s ok.
Other than that, so far so good. I’d almost say that it’s ready to put out to the wild. I’m guessing and hoping that this is the kind of feedback they want.
Plugins that didn’t work for me?
Popularity Contest
WP Sticky
Top commentators widget
Things are going to be changing around here. Not sure if they’re all good, but if you visit this site and there is some kind of funkiness, you’ve been warned.
I’m trying to make some changes and they might impact the site a bit. Of course, preparing for EE 2.0 too. We’ll see how things go.
If you are like me, and missed going to SXSW, there is now a screencast of the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Preview.
It looks exciting, except I’m not entirely sure on the look of the control panel. But they say it’s completely changeable via themes, so I’m not really worried about that.
So, Wordpress 2.5 is coming out on March 17th. It was a bit delayed from the March 10 mark, but I figured that’s ok, because honestly, if you get more time to work out the bugs and issues, the better. But there are still issues with the back-end.
With the change in the administration panel, many plug-ins will most likely break. I realize now that a lot of people have updated their plug-ins, but not all plug-ins would be covered of course. If you’ve been keeping up with your plug-ins, you may or may not have any problems.
On the Wordpress Development Updates page you’ll note that the administration panel does have selectable color schemes. I’ve been waitin for something like this, although you are able to customize the back end pretty easily. The idea that you can pick whichever suits your mood is a bonus to me.
You might consider waiting to update your installation of Wordpress still. Just make sure your plugins are up to date and support the new administration panel. I think that’s just about the biggest issue. There are minimal things to worry about with the theme design, the biggest thing being able to use gravatars natively without a separate plugin. Get ready to upgrade!
It’s been reported that “Downer" cows entered the food supply. The president of Westland/Hallmark Meat Company admitted that a couple of “downer” cows could have entered the food supply. Prior to this, he had said that no such cows have entered the food supply. So now, he’s admitting he’s wrong.
“Downer” cows is the term used for cows that cannot stand on their own or are sick. Downer cows are not allowed into the food supply because of the scare of mad cow disease.
He was quoted as saying, “the activities shown on the video are not ‘food safety issues.’ The cows shown in the video could not walk, were designated to be euthanized and were not put into commerce.” What I’d like to know is whether or not that it’s normal that cows that are to be euthanized are subjected to such treatment.
It’s quite obvious that the cows are being treated horribly. I for one cannot believe they would not at the very least be charged with cruelty to animals. Just because an animal is going to be euthanized, I don’t think that gives excuse for anyone to cause any kind of cruelty to them.
Because of the recall, they’ve lost millions of dollars and are possibly going to shut down operations. I say that’s fine, and they well deserved it.
Am I wrong to feel this way?
It seems the phrase “Don’t drink the water” can now be applied to water in the USA. You might may recall cybrpunk being sick because he drank some water in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Well, what if you went to a restaurant in San Francisco and got sick too?
Apparently, prescription drugs are being distributed into the drinking water. How is this happening? Believe it or not, it’s coming from us. It may come from waste water treatment plants. Ask yourself how many medications you have that you flush down the toilet? A lot right? That’s right, guess what, a lot of waste water is purified, treated and then piped back into the drinking water. While the process gets rid of a lot of harmful bacteria and such that will make you sick, it doesn’t get rid of all the drugs that are in it.
You’re probably saying that you don’t drink the tap water, you drink bottled water. Guess what? Most of bottled water is still the same thing as tap water, except it’s filtered out numerous more times. And you guessed it, the drugs still aren’t filtered out.
What can we do? Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy solution in sight. Since we can’t get people to even take some measure to saving energy, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to get people to stop taking as much prescription medication. Honestly. People are addicted to drugs. But that’s and entirely different story.
For more detail, read the CNN news article: Prescription drugs found in drinking water across U.S.
Ok, since I’m not actually at the SXSW, I don’t get to actually see all the cool things they might have. But a few people have been kind enough to post about some of the things they’ve learned from the previews. First of all, allow me to link you to the EE 2.0 preview photos at David Russells flickr stream. As you can see, they’ve changed the layout of the CP. It looks good! Reminds me a bit of WP 2.5 and Blogger (it’s the orange), but I can live with it.
Some highlights:
1. EE 2.0 will be based on Code Igniter. What this means is that the structure will change. But they’re promising backward compatibility. This is good!
2. jQuery - this should speed things up! We all know that speed and ease of use is their goals for the CP. This will indeed be cool.
I seriously hope they release and make available the developer edition so we can pretty up our plugins and modules. Not that I think there will be a need for the linklist in 2.0. I’m sure they’ve made something better for it!
More to come as I find things out.
UPDATED: Derek has released some Official EE 2.0 screenshots! You should check them out. Now! What are you still doing here?
If you’re going to SXSW this year, I envy you. You’ll get to see the ExpressionEngine 2.0 preview (should you attend the Ellislab booth) and get some nice free Ellislab T-shirts! I’m particularly looking at the codeigniter and exp:developer shirts. Of course, I’m a junkie for T-shirts, so I’d take them all if I could.
Leslie is apparently going to be blogging tidbits on what’s upcoming at the SXSW presentation, so be sure to tune into the ExpressionEngine Blog!
